`David': Incoherent Treatise

BOOKS - NONFICTION

January 4, 1998|By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT The New York Times News Servic

THE BOOK OF DAVID: A New Story of the Spiritual Warrior and Leader Who Shaped Our Inner Consciousness. David Rosenberg. Ills. Harmony Books. $24. 272 pp.

The introduction to David Rosenberg's new work, The Book of David, offers such an exciting prospect that one prepares to have the scales peeled from one's eyes. The story of the biblical David ``must change now, irrevocably,'' Rosenberg begins. A new David stands revealed, he declaims, a David who ``embodied an inner consciousness newly in tune with an outer world of human and social creations.''

This is not the conventional David of ``David and Goliath . . . David and Saul and the rest,'' Rosenberg assures us. Instead it is a David who was ``our first Renaissance man: a poet and thinker, a warrior and peacemaker, a leader and innovator,'' and the subject of a brilliant literary work written by a court historian in the reign of Rehoboam who was known to biblical scholars as S because his life of David is embedded in the Bible's books of Samuel.

S's genius, Rosenberg argues, was to revive the repressed history of ``the aboriginal people of Israel who provided the basis for an Israelite religion'' and were David's forebears. How does Rosenberg know all this? What are his sources? Are they new, or is he drawing on the research he did for his previous books, The Lost Book of Paradise, A Poet's Bible and especially The Book of J? The latter work, which he wrote with Harold Bloom, tried to prove that J (for Jahweh) _ S's predecessor and intimate, and the author of the Pentateuch _ was a woman.

And what exactly does Rosenberg mean when he writes that to prepare for the restoration of the Bible as a process of ``artistic creation'' he had to move ``to an area near the Florida Everglades, where I could experience an overwhelming ecosystem and its restoration by poet-scientists at the frontiers of our culture''?

The more you read of The Book of David, the more bewildered you become by Rosenberg's scattershot passion, as he increasingly becomes fixated on what he sees as the legion of scholars too unimaginative to see the Bible as anything more than the recording of an oral tradition by scribes.

Then, without warning, on Page 71 you come upon The Book of David: A New Translation (presumably by Rosenberg), and you expect that everything will now become clear. But matters only get worse. The translation is an English rendering of II Samuel, Chapters 9 through 20, plus I Kings, Chapter 1, verses 1 through 4.

It appears to add little to the King James version except for inexplicable little oddities of translation.

Then follows a sampling of David's Psalms, in which Rosenberg has the temerity to render ``The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,'' into ``The Lord is my shepherd and keeps me from wanting what I can't have.''

Then we descend into a discussion of Michelangelo's sculpture of David, in which Rosenberg declares: ``At the center of all this is his sex, the matter-of-factness of David's genitalia. He is a new fruit that will bear even more new fruit.'' This is a poet writing?

Finally, the author offers up a discussion of the symbolism of the six points of David's star or shield. Here we encounter prose that rings like an astrological column in a daily tabloid: ``The lower triangle of the hexagram star contains the qualities of emotional knowledge, and the upper triangle the modes of activation or intellect.'' I could hardly read on.

Something important may be buried beneath this prose. At least one hopes that there is some explanation for the author's being excited to the point of incoherence.